Comment on Review

Microsoft Power BI Desktop

4.4

(65 reviews)

Power BI Desktop is part of the Power BI product suite. Use Power BI Desktop to create and distribute BI content. To monitor key data and share dashboards and reports, use the Power BI web service. To view and interact with your data on any mobile device, get the Power BI Mobile app on the AppStore, Google Play or the Microsoft Store. To embed stunning, fully interactive reports and visuals into your applications use Power BI Embedded

What do you like best?

What I like best about Power BI is that they are constantly (monthly and even in between) making updates, adding new features or upgrade to current features and functionalities. They really seem to listen to the user base on feedback, wants and needs.

What do you dislike?

That I cannot insert or use custom fonts. Some of the ways that you can or have to enter the Queries, however I am still learning that art of Power BI so that may change as times goes on.

Recommendations to others considering the product

For others considering Microsoft Power BI, I would recommend watching a few videos and visiting the Power BI website to get familiar with Power BI. It may look a but overwhelming at first, but just like any other product you will get used to the functionality and different options.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use Power BI to bring clients branding look and feel into the platform to utilize from executives and end users. We are able to utilize the dashboard features that is highlight beneficial for man cases.

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What do you like best?

We use PowerBI Desktop for managing users for one of the .NET projects - the level of filtering is great (especially for our low-level needs). The latest version has colorful data visualization options which are convenient for reporting and we have used those for our project.

It also can work with Excel data sheets and other sources of information which makes it a convenient instrument for data management in general (not just for user database, like we use it).

What do you dislike?

Like with most Microsoft products, there are sometimes too many features that are overwhelming at the very beginning when you first create an account (and you're not a developer whose minds seem to think in a different way.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It takes a bit of practice to get used to it, but in general, it does what it's supposed to. From what our developers have said, it is very convenient for user management for projects that are either written using .NET technologies or are integrated with other Microsoft products.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use Microsoft Power BI Desktop for a web & mobile app user management and analytics. It offers a convenient dashboard of the information and various filters to narrow down the information (we have over 15K users from all over the world.)

It's also easy to create visual reports which are convenient when you need to present the information to your boss (or investors - or pretty much anyone) and Excel or PowerPoint visualizations aren't enough.

What do you like best?

It has a lot of built-in integrations with different types od databases, marketing solutions (Google Analytics, Google Adwords). You can get and visualize a lot of data from different sources and share it with your colegues, partners and so on.

Updates are every month. User also can share with his reports or controllers and you can use it on your own project, It's working as reports on your browser or as PowerBI Desktop file. You can edit and share reports or grab data online.

What do you like best?

The tool is very light on pocket unlike other BI tools and is provided by one of the biggest player in the IT world. The tool's ability to handle big chunk of data is commendable.Extremely powerful platform with a wealth of data source connectors. Very user-friendly. Exceptional data visualization capabilities.

What do you dislike?

While working with report development at times it is pretty difficult to know if the report is loading or not because of the small wheel spinning at the extreme left top corner of a table which requires efforts to figure out the report processing because of the size of the spinning wheel.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Power BI is a very good analytics and self service visualization tool provided by Microsoft. The support is good and quick for the tool. This tool does not stick to a company size. Any company be it small scale or on a large scale can use the tool.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Working on a store and sales report for one of Canada's biggest retailer. Working with Power BI has given me a good exposure of other technologies as well. I also got to work on many other technologies like SQL Server Analysis services(SSAS) for tabular modelling with Teradata as Data Source and SQL Server Reporting services(SSRS) for paginated reports with HANA as Data source. This tools give you a hint of the ETL process too during the data preparation.

What do you like best?

Power BI Desktop is a great tool for data analysis and visualization. It is perfectly suited for business analysts who want to model their data, analyze it, and present interactive visualizations to stakeholders. The learning curve is not very steep, so it allows you to move from a raw dataset to an appealing end product without too much effort.

What do you dislike?

The drag and drop interface is inconvenient for power users. It would be nice to have some sort of XML configuration that can be used to quickly make changes to properties such as page layouts, visual sizes, and visual colors.

Recommendations to others considering the product

This is a great tool that has only been getting better with every monthly release.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I am a web analyst and I use Power BI as my primary data visualization tool. It is easy to ramp up on and the integration with DAX allows me to create custom formulas once I've modeled my data. This lets me spot trends in my data and tell a story that drives business stakeholders to take action.

What do you like best?

Microsoft Power BI feels like a better version of Excel. The great enhancement, for me, is the possibility of having several tools to improve my data visualization, allowing me to have plenty of different reports, customized for each project. That, and the possibility of fetching data online as well.

What do you dislike?

I guess I would be happier if it was easier to edit data files. I mean, contrary to Excel, in which we can edit right on time any cell, in a sheet, on Power BI you have to you the console/coding lines or specific commands to edit the data in each cell. Due to this, it is usually better to do some cleaning on Excel before jumping into Power BI.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are looking for a better way to show your data, Microsoft did it right with this product!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Essentially, data visualization problems/challenges. It allows to send reports to customers, as well as work on specific tasks inside the organization (like evaluation processes and its individual reports).

What do you like best?

Everything - I like the open source mentality that Microsoft has taken with Power BI. I think that is what has made this such an effective product - they get their feedback directly from the consumer and implement the ideas. Excellent approach. I love the versatility of the software the most. There's very little it can't do with data. The backend Power Query environment is wonderful to work with. The Power BI community is wonderful to work with as well. You will not find one more engaging and supportive.

What do you dislike?

There are some little basic features that would be nice to have. (print formatting for pages, sharing of reports from desktop, PDFs, etc...). The documentation for some of the connectors could be a little more descriptive (i.e. web connector). Other than that - the resources available for Power BI are endless.

Recommendations to others considering the product

You have absolutely nothing to lose by trying it! Even the basic free features offer more than standard Excel. Even the Pro investment is cost effective. Able to be used by ANY size business. 1 person or 10,000.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We have implemented Power BI so far, in four of our divisions. One company is using it to track growth, sales development and opportunities, sales rep performance and much more. Another is using it for Research and Development to analyze new product development. Another is using it for core, operating reports for finance and other specific-to-us business needs.

What do you like best?

Power BI Desktop is free to use and learn when getting started. It supports up to 70+ data sources, monthly feature updates, and bi-weekly patches. Microsoft is taking feedback from the community and incorporating that feedback into the product. Anyone can download Power BI Desktop and start working with it for free. Sharing dashboards and deliverables will require a Pro license.

What do you dislike?

Limited distribution for on-prem solutions. They just release a feature update where you can integrate dashboards into your SharePoint sites. The downside is with licensing, you have to have a Pro license in order to drill down into the dashboards. At $9.99/month/user it can add up when you need 500+ people to look at things like KPI or P&L reports. Overtime I think the development of the product will make it easier to work around this. Customization of the dashboards are limited, you can't add your company logo or branding like you can with SSRS.

Recommendations to others considering the product

The direct competitor to Power BI is Tableau. Power BI is free to check out so you don't have to be tied to any trail or demo periods. I would download it and give it a spin.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

It's good for issues where you have many sources of data and you want to combine them and drill down into them without having to spend a lot of money on a full blown BI solution. This software works well for things like KPI, P&L, and analyzing costs and sales. We use the map feature where you can show a given metric on a map and see where your cost or sales are by location.

What do you like best?

We had made several attempts at incorporating BI visualizations into our analysis but Tableau was out of our reach and SAS BI was too complex for the majority of our users. For us then, Power BI was eyeopening because it connected to all of our data sources and within weeks we were using the drill-down functionality to do visual analysis that we weren't previously capable of.

There is complexity and we have a couple of developers who dedicated themselves to learning the specifics and intracacies of DAX code and whom regularly download the latest updates to say current but for most users it is pretty straight forward.

What do you dislike?

As other reviews have stated, it is not easily shareable. For our purposes, each analyst has their own copies of analytic dashboards and we have to make special versions with pre-loaded data if we need to present out.

Also, while it is very nice that they keep adding features, as our developers incorporate new functions, all users have to individually update their Desktpop BI. We're approaching 90 analysts so this is becoming cumbersome even if it only takes a couple of minutes.

For our purposes Power BI has been a great tool and an excellent introduction to BI in general but it does belong in the Self-Service category for now until it is more enterprise-friendly to compete with big boys.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We have been able to directly connect to a number of data sources which have allowed us to move beyond Excel and Access and also to build datasets from record-level to aggregate-level and then drill back down making new connections and outliers more readily identifiable.

What do you like best?

I love how easily it connects to a different platform and easy to import data to your tool so you can play around with it and create dynamic charts, graphs, and reports. Its great that you can download add-ons and different graphs from the store as well.

What do you dislike?

There are some limitation in customization the charts and graphs the way you like but I am guessing with Microsoft is working on further enhancements on those.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Microsoft finally has a great dashboarding tool that is heading in the right direction. Its full of possibilities and what you could do with your data.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We were using Business Objects Dashboard and after moving to Power BI we noticed how much advance and dynamic dashboarding has gotten. It is really easy to integrate to different systems and pull data from different sources for analyzing

What do you like best?

The Power BI tool provides an easy method to create reports and dashboards to visualize your data. This allows you to present your data in a way that the raw data cannot, especially to those who need a graph or other visualization to understand the information. Also, you have the ability to use either static information or link to a server to provide live data through direct query.

What do you dislike?

The product still seems so disjointed and incomplete. It is disjointed because you can do many features within Power BI desktop, but you still need to login to Power BI service in order to do simple tasks such as share a dashboard or report add row level security. While it is nice the product receives monthly updates, it is still lacking in many features. The interface still looks like it is from Office 2010 and does not have a modern interface. There is no way to easily choose a theme for your project. You either use the dull default theme or have to find/code a JSON file to bring to customize the theme for your project. There are still areas where you will need to use some DAX code to complete a task, however that seems to be minimizing more and more with each update. Another downfall of the product is that it is not updated through Windows update. In order to update the file, you are notified in small text in the lower right-hand corner of the software. From there you are directed to the Power BI website to download the new version of the software. Another pitfall is you are unable to combine static information and live (direct query) information together.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Power BI Desktop provides many useful tools and features. However, it is not a finished product as it is being updated constantly. While it is great to have new features added on a regular basis, it is also frustrating to work with a software that is constantly in flux and incomplete.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Power BI allows us to create a dashboard with live information that is broad as well as unique to each location. By utilizing row-level security we can create one dashboard for everyone, but users are only allowed to see information based on their permission level.

What do you like best?

in our field creating management dashboard to control our project is necessary. one of the best tools that have a lot of ready features, is Microsoft BI. easy to use and fast. appreciate Microsoft for that.

What do you dislike?

i don't like it's format . it's design not beautiful.

and it,s not enough flexible. i don't know Microsoft BI support programming tools or not. that is make it very flexible.

Recommendations to others considering the product

it one of the best for create management dashboard.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

that was very useful to convince my manager . we summarize our report and we reported paperless.

in one of the my report for control some street activity in our project we had about 20 paper reports. after create our management dashboard we throw them in trash bag. and safe a lot of time and cost. that was very satisfied behavior from our managers.

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

Not being able to create measures from a Live Connection on a SQL Analysis Server.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you want a low cost way of exploring and visualizing data, you should consider Microsoft Power BI Desktop.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We want to provide our customer base a self-service data exploration tool that is more sophisticated than Microsoft Excel. Our expectation of this product is for it to allow us to explore, analyze, create measures, visualize results and share those results with other staff.

The biggest benefit that we have realized with this product is that staff are excited to work with their data in ways they did not know existed. Staff are empowered to venture out of their comfort zone to discover new outcomes related to their data.

What do you like best?

In my opinion, the best feature (and greatest strength) of Power BI Desktop is its ability to create connections with hundreds (maybe, even thousands) of data types. The connections range from simple Excel workbooks, to complex databases, to commonly used consumer products such as Salesforce and Google Analytics. The ability of the Power BI Desktop to connect to data is simply outstanding. It also seems that each product improvement (released monthly) improves the number of data connectors that are available.

What do you dislike?

I dislike the fact that it is not currently possible to link the data between "Pages". "Pages" in Power BI desktop are similar to worksheets in Excel. However, unlike Excel, you cannot reference calculations from one page to another in Power BI desktop. This is frustrating from time to time, especially if you are a skilled Excel users that performs calculations across worksheets.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Make sure that your IT team is involved in the initial setup of the product. Installing a data gateway was a bit troublesome for our team. Once we figured out the issues, though, the product has run smoothly. It is also important to stay on top of the updates, which occur monthly. There are always great features added to the updates. They also post a great video online describing all the feature updates.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are trying to use this product to help improve our business intelligence as well as business analytics. Stated differently, we are looking at ways to user Power BI desktop that would help us to operate more efficiently and with more data driven decisions. The analytics portion of our work is important in that Power BI desktop allows us to easily look at time-series trends. Once we have the data connectors and calculations built, the data refreshes automatically and we see almost live-time information. This has really allowed us to bring important information to the forefront of our business. Rather than individual employees running reports to the status of KPIs, we are able to build a report in Power BI Desktop that all can see.

What do you like best?

I like how easy it is to connect to data sources and create a dashboard from scratch

What do you dislike?

I dislike the error messages received, sometimes they don't give much of an explanation to what the cause of the issue is.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Power BI is simple and easy to use and quick to set up dashboards for users, as long as your business is collecting the right information it should be simple enough to create a dashboard that can give your business insight into the data collected.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

It allows our business to dive into their data and help them in making more informed business decisions based of the data.

What do you like best?

Power BI is a very robust tool. It integrated with the other Microsoft tools will because it is also Microsoft but had connections for virtually every data source. It is inexpensive compared to other BI solutions and is easily scaled. Desktop version is free so you can try before you make the leap to pro. It has so many options and features. Monthly updates with added features and function.

What do you dislike?

The monthly updates make it difficult to keep up especially with in premises deployment to a internal server rather than the cloud service. There is a learning curve with so many features. Measures can be a bit different to build than in other tools.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Of all BI tools I think PowerBI is among the best. In the next 5 years they will pull away from others due to their strong foundation in AI and vice recognition. The monthly updates also allow quick response to customer needs and an ever improving platform. Of the 7 BI tools I have used, this is probably the best bet for the future especially if you utilize other Microsoft tools.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Everyone wants BI dashboards. Execs want at a glance web based pages that tell them everything at a high level with the portion to drill into the detail. This allows an attractive interface to meet those needs.

What do you like best?

I really enjoyed the dashboard sticky tile layout design. It makes creating dashboards much more convenient and you can line up everything perfectly.

What do you dislike?

The lack of customization is a real setback for me. It really could use more options when it comes to adding titles, hiding things on a graph, and adding measures the way that other tools are able to do.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I think that it needs some time to mature, but for the cost, it's a great tool.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Creating dashboards that show a products health over time and to gather quick statistics about that product.

What do you like best?

I like how easy it is to create visuals, once you have the data pulled in. There are also a lot of different types of visuals, which allows us to customize our dashboards to display our information in the best way.

What do you dislike?

It has a very steep learning curve, specifically pertaining to working with the data in the Queries. Power BI uses both DAX and Power Query M, which are different that excel formulas. It took me and my co-workers a long time to catch on.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Power BI is allowing us to pull data in for all departments and analyze it in an efficient manner. It allows us to be transparent and push the data out to all teams, so they are all able to use the same data to make data driven decisions.

What do you like best?

Its very user friendly. Any person without much knowledge of writing queries can build them in Power BI. Very impressive graphs. Drill down functionality is provided. I like the part wherein we can see the actual data that makes the graph. So if we have some discrepancy in data, it is easy to see which data is causing the discrepancy. Any upgrade or changes to the query can be done pretty easily . Also a change in the data source can be done at one point and all graphs will be updated automatically. It is easy to integrate into any iframe. This software is great for any company which needs data refreshed once in a couple of hours. Its easy to display the dashboards on large monitors. Each graph itself can be magnified and displayed.

What do you dislike?

Security or any restrictions has to be build in BI itself. It does not take existing user access or permissions from the database. Rebuilding the entire security structure is tedious. Also the row level security feature provided by BI sometimes does not allow users to see any data. It has some sort of glitch. In order to have a real time update, I need to install MS Embedded and Azure in addition to Power BI. I cannot filter the results in slicer. i.e. Power BI does not allow the slicer to show only the last 5 years by default and then allow the user to select remaining years.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Management reports are more user interactive. Its easy for managers to see the data and analyze it without much help from IT department. Since the graphs also provide the data, the user can download the report in excel. The graphs are beautiful and pretty impressive hence the sales team found it very useful.

What do you like best?

Ease of use. Many data sources have a built-in connector already set up. You just client the connector, walk through a few easy settings & boom you have your data. Building out your reports is just as easy and intuitive. Click and drag: that easy.

What do you dislike?

Many of the data connectors I need are not built in. SO I need to find work arounds to visualize and aggregate my data.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Stick with them. They are constantly puttin gout new features, connectors, and more. The staff at Microsoft is also open to suggestions. If you have something you need, request it. They put out updates monthly!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

PowerBI desktop is lighter weight than Excel and has various visualization tools. Good tool for testing out visualization ideas, combine data for reporting, and creating reports. No plugins required for the desktop version. The dashboard visualizations are very good.

What do you dislike?

When using PowerBI through Office 365, it needs plugins and silverlight to render reports. Also, it is slow when working with larger datasets. Another thing is that the Office 365 version of the PowerBI is not as easy to learn as the desktop version. The compatibility with CRM is also lacking, there is no supported method to view CRM reports and dashboards within CRM application.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Keep file size to no larger than 250mb, and you need good data to generate good results.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

PowerBI is a useful tool for creating quick reports and professional graphics. Power query is also useful for data research.

What do you like best?

I'm a new user to Power BI, I've come across lot of interesting facts about visualization and data analysis. As a Supply Chain professional, recently I started learning about BI tools and a friend of mine suggested me to learn Power BI. I really loved the way a simple data can be turned into visualization without any coding involved. I can easily analyze any amount of data set into a beautiful report. I'm loving it.

What do you dislike?

There is nothing much as of now that I can say about Power BI which I dislike. Only thing I found was I could not remove the filters applied on columns without having deleting the entire task in edit mode. I'm hoping for a fix soon.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I use Power BI mainly to work on large data set which needs a visualization and make a report of it. It makes my work easier.

What do you like best?

It was very easy to take data from other Microsoft sources including SQL, Excel, Access, and more and manipulate and present data in exciting ways.

What do you dislike?

Still a very new program that is rolling out updates often, there are still some functionality that is missing or does not work as easily as I would like. My least favorite from a user experience point of view is having to right click to drill down through reports and dashboards while double clicking is much more intuitive to the user.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Our IT chose Power BI because of the cost when included with a enterprise level 365 accounts compared to prices of other tools. The other popular BI tools are probably ahead of Power BI now but they will not be for long.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Able to easily extract data from multiple sources and departments and share it in one place. We can control the KPIs and dashboards to keep the focus where the executives want it instead of each department having their own.

What do you like best?

Easy to use with graphs that look much more polished than Excel. Graphs are far easier to set up than excel.

What do you dislike?

Not easily shared with people outside of organization. It is also a bit strange navigating the desktop version and the online version and when to use each.

Recommendations to others considering the product

This product is really cool way to visualize your data. It has many options for customization, which makes it very versatile. For me, the ability to upload mapping tables to combine multiple data sets is a big help.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

It is an easy way to quickly visualize data and gain insights to my business goals.

What do you like best?

The ability to be able to create dashboards for different applications on one screen, This type of reporting is great for senior management who sometimes prefer to see graphs rather than text. The dashboards are fully interactive too which engages the users. The ability to connect to on-premise systems as well as SaaS applications such as Office 365 is a great feature of PowerBI

What do you dislike?

The lack of export options. It seems that PowerBI is a standalone product and would be good if you could integrate into SharePoint or other web based systems.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Consider setting up a trial tenant before commiting to the full product. The free version is limited in features.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Senior Management wanted reporting across all of our applications. PowerBI was the able to provide this for our organisation. Being an IT focused organisation, our directors are keen for us to use the latest technologies so that we can offer these services to our customers.

What do you like best?

Simply put -- it's extremely executive friendly. The built in Q&A feature that leverages natural language has the ability to immediately grab an audience's attention when presenting data. The whole experience is easily customizable on the fly, giving you a level of self-service reporting fluidity that's currently unmatched.

What do you dislike?

It currently has to be consumed in a preview version or provisioned through an Office 365 tenant. Microsoft has announced future plans, however, to be able to extend this into web applications.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Understand what the product does and doesn't do. It should be used to extend -- not replace -- other vehicles of reporting.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The same business problem all data and BI consultants try to solve: converting raw data into business wisdom in real time. I'm bought into Power BI's place in this problem solving process because my stakeholders have bought into it. It's by no means a full-fledged analytics solution but I'd be challenged to find a business decision maker that wouldn't want Power BI leveraged at a presentation layer.

What do you like best?

The best part of Power BI is its ability to Self Serve. I have been in the world of BI since past 6 years but with the advent of Power BI especially Power Views, Power Queries and Power BI Dashboards life has been so easy for any Engineer and Business Team. Power BI will change the way BI has been performing all through this time.

What do you dislike?

I havent see any downsides yet with Power BI expect for few hiccups with Power Query and Power BI Dashboard but since these are still in Beta versions and Product teams are relentlessly working to resolve few incapabilities. I love Power BI and I do not see any major downsides so far.

Recommendations to others considering the product

This is a phenomenal tool that works best for teams that use heavy legacy tools like Microsoft Excel , Reporting Services and third party tools for Dashboards. Microsoft Power BI provides revolutionary tools like Bi Semantic Model connections to Power Views which helps manage your data, Power Query to share your internal data On Cloud and On Premise, Power BI Dashboard to provide extensive Business Dashboard that your Business needs for their Monthly Business Reviews and above all Power Maps that show your Business teams are performing and how your vendor base has been operating across the world.

All in All this is an outstanding creation by Microsoft in the recent days. I have been using this tool in my team for more than 1 year now and we have made tremendous progress in Engineering , Business team and External Partner team in North America and across World Wide. 5 star and 2 thumbs up!!!!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I work with Bing Ads Support team in Microsoft and we have a lot of partner teams that need access to our data. With the advent of Power BI especially Power Query life has become so easy for all of us. We have created OData Feeds and create views for each Partner and Vendor teams and share them accordingly. With this we were able to overcome a lot of existing problems like managing separate databases , security, space constraints and periodical ETL's running on local databases to keep the data updated. Power Query has made a phenomenal impact on our team and life is seamlessly easy.

What do you like best?

MS work environment, so must of the users are able to learn the menu alternatives, of course need to know what they are looking for.

A lot of data sources alternatives, it is very good.

What do you dislike?

No filters at data extraction level, as far as I know.

Recommendations to others considering the product

As always, validate your our alternatives, maybe there are already some Self services tools in your company, if to, take the time to evaluate alternatives and chose the one that fits your needs and budget

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I have created some Dashboard for the business areas of the company I work for, once the data model is ready, create a nice dashboard takes very few time.

What do you like best?

This is a user friendly way to aggregate and visualize data. The interface makes it really easy to manipulate large data sets into meaningful visuals just by dragging and dropping variables where you want them.

What do you dislike?

I would like a bit more flexibility in creating graphs and charts. The visualization options can be a little limiting sometimes for making colors and labels look nice enough to share with clients. Also, I sometimes have trouble with axis ordering and other weirdness.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Data aggregation and visualization. Power BI makes it easier for even less tech-savy users to analyze data.

What do you like best?

The intuitiveness of Power BI gives Tableau a run for their money. You don't need separate software to share to other users, it integrates with Office365. The developers are very responsive to feedback.

What do you dislike?

It's not as mature as Tableau but it's already surpassed it in functionality.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We have been able to actually share our business intelligence instead of having it in the hands of a select few.

What do you like best?

I like how easy it is to integrate various data sources into a simple, aesthetically pleasing dashboard

What do you dislike?

I wish that PowerBI provided more functionality related to analytics and forecasting. Sometimes I want to display forecasts on my dashboards, but I often have to perform calculations manually before uploading my data instead of letting PowerBI do the work

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I am providing dashboards to business analysts so that they can quickly gain insight into their data and easily share it with others. PowerBI has saved me 50% of the time required to make a dashboard compared to my previous method

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